Justin Taylor's Blog, page 158

Jesus Is the Smartest Person Who Has Ever Lived

Dallas Willard:

At the literally mundane level Jesus knew how to transform the molecular structure of water to make it wine, that knowledge also allowed him to take a few pieces of bread and some little fish and feed thousands of people.

He could create matter from the energy that he knew how to access from “the heavens right,” where he was. . . .

He knew how to transform the tissues of the human body from sickness to health and from death of life.

He knew how to suspend gravity, interrupt weather patterns, eliminate unfruitful trees without saw or ax. He only needed a word. Surely he must be amused at what Nobel prizes are awarded for today.

Saying Jesus is Lord can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate in saying Jesus is smart.

He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who has ever lived.

He is now supervising the entire course of human history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2).

He always has the best information on everything and certainly on the things that matter most in the human life.

— Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 94-95.

See also Willard’s article “Jesus the Logician.”

6 Books from the Great Christian Tradition of Pastoral Care

In his insightful essay, “The Pastor as Counselor” (in For the Fame of God’s Name), David Powlison writes, “You stand in a tradition of pastoral care reaching back through centuries. Wise Christians have come before you. Set out to learn from your brethren” (p. 441). Here are his recommendations:

[Gregory the Great]

Every pastor will profit by reading Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, written almost fifteen hundred years ago. We may have better hermeneutics, wider doctrinal understanding, and more awareness of the richness of the gospel of Jesus. But Gregory has more awareness of “the Truth in person,” more case-wisdom, more flexibility in adapting to human differences, more sense of pastoral responsibility, more humility about his achievements, more alertness to the subtlety of sin. Stand on his shoulders.

[Richard Baxter]

Every pastor will profit from reading Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor.

Baxter is dense, and, like all old books, dated. You won’t do ministry in the same way he did.

But if you sit with Baxter, you will become a wiser pastor.

[Bonhoeffer]

Similarly, every pastor will profit from reading Thomas Oden’s Pastoral Counsel and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. Oden’s digest of ancient wisdom will introduce you to wise pastors you never knew existed. Your church history class likely explored the development of doctrine and events in church politics. Oden explores how pastors pastored. Bonhoeffer’s twentieth-century wisdom and example will inform and nerve you as you take up your unique counseling calling.

[Fiction]

Every pastor would also profit from carefully pondering Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Why fiction? In both books, the protagonist is a pastor, and you will learn how Christian life and ministry work on the inside amid the untidy details of life lived.

Am I Receiving and Giving Criticism in a Godly Way?

Alfred Poirier summarizes four points:

1. Critique yourself.

How do I typically react to correction?

Do I pout when criticized or corrected?

What is my first response when someone says I’m wrong?

Do I tend to attack the person?

To reject the content of criticism?

To react to the manner?

How well do I take advice?

How well do I seek it?

Are people able to approach me to correct me?

Am I teachable?

Do I harbor anger against the person who criticizes me?

Do I immediately seek to defend myself, hauling out my righteous acts and personal opinions in order to defend myself and display my rightness?

Can my spouse, parents, children, brothers, sisters, or friends correct me?

2. Ask the Lord to give you a desire to be wise instead of a fool.

Use Proverbs to commend to yourself the goodness of being willing and able to receive criticism, advice, rebuke, counsel, or correction. Meditate upon the passages given above: Proverbs 9:9; 12:15; 13:10,13; 15:32; 17:10; Psalm 141:5.

3. Focus on your crucifixion with Christ.

While I can say I have faith in Christ, and even say with Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ,” yet I still find myself not living in light of the cross. So I challenge myself with two questions.

First, if I continually squirm under the criticism of others, how can I say I know and agree with the criticism of the cross?

Second, if I typically justify myself, how can I say I know, love, and cling to God’s justification of me through Christ’s cross?

This drives me back to contemplating God’s judgment and justification of the sinner in Christ on the cross. As I meditate on what God has done in Christ for me, I find a resolve to agree with and affirm all that God says about me in Christ, with whom I’ve been crucified.

4. Learn to speak nourishing words to others.

I want to receive criticism as a sinner living within Jesus’ mercy, so how can I give criticism in a way that communicates mercy to another?

Accurate, balanced criticism, given mercifully, is the easiest to hear—and even against that my pride rebels.

Unfair criticism or harsh criticism (whether fair or unfair) is needlessly hard to hear.

How can I best give accurate, fair criticism, well tempered with mercy and affirmation?

* * *

Read the whole article here.

What Is a Christian?

A Christian is one

who recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, as God manifested in the flesh, loving us and dying for our redemption;

and who is so affected by a sense of the love of this incarnate God as to be constrained to make the will of Christ the rule of his obedience, and the glory of Christ the great end for which he lives.

—Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (1863), p. 133.

The Loss of Historical Adam and the Death of Exegesis

Steven Wedgeworth, commenting on the revisionist work of Peter Enns and J. R. Daniel Kirk and the agnosticism of Tremper Longman on the historical Adam:

What we are seeing in theological circles is a new refusal to exegete at all. Instead of demonstrating the ways in which the rest of the Bible supports a figurative or mythical reading of Genesis, we are told that it doesn’t matter if even the Old and New Testament writers were mistaken. Dr. Kirk asks, “Is it possible to affirm the point Paul wishes to make—that God’s grace, righteousness, and life abound to the many because of Christ—without simultaneously affirming the assumptions with which he illustrated these things to be true?” His answer is typical of the new hermeneutical shift:

To accompany Paul on the task of telling the story of the beginning in light of Christ, while parting ways with his first-century understanding of science and history, is not to abandon the Christian faith in favor of science. Instead, it demands a fresh act of faith in which we continue to hold fast to the truth that has always defined Christianity: the crucified Messiah is the resurrected Lord over all. Belief in Christ’s resurrection was a stumbling block for the ancients, and it is a stumbling block for us moderns as well—and increasingly so as we learn more about our human story and the biological processes entailed in life on this Earth. We do not give up on the central article of Christian faith when we use it to tell a renewed story of where we came from. On the contrary, we thereby give it the honor which is its due.

Buried in this layered answer is the simple affirmative. Yes, “Is it possible to affirm the point Paul wishes to make . . . without simultaneously affirming the assumptions with which he illustrated these things to be true.” This is possible because “the story” is not really dependent upon history, at least not until we get to the crucifixion and resurrection. We can “retell the narrative” and “reimagine the story” just so long as we retain the Christological center. There is an essential kernel to the faith which can be intelligibly removed from the its husk, and we thus reminded the words of the Preacher: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Here the reader sees the situation as it is. The dispute is not an exegetical one. It is barely a hermeneutical one. Rather, the current debate is a metaphysical one. The answers will be dependent upon prolegomena. Must the Biblical story be grounded in real history, or will it suffice if only “the Christ event” is so? What is never openly discussed, however, is the way in which separating “the Christ event” from its backstory changes the story itself. In fact, the story can no longer enjoy a definite article in the world-scope. Apart from its foundation in creation, it must rather become a story.

What exactly does this reimagining accomplish? The none-too-insignificant answer is that it changes our narrative of reality altogether. The Scriptures, and our religion, no longer tell a story about the structure of reality, but rather only of a particular subset of experience within it. In short, this retelling and reimaging also accomplishes a significant privatization of religious truth.

You can read the whole thing here.

Readers interested in this may also want to consult the recent article by Vern Poythress on “Adam Versus Claims from Genetics,” which should encourage a little more epistemic humility and a little less naïveté when it comes to Christians appropriating the latest claims of some scientists.

Is This Heaven? No, It’s Hobbiton

The actors from The Hobbit recount their favorite locations in New Zealand:

Perhaps a faint glimmer of the new heavens and the new earth?

HT: Alan Jacobs

Ratifying Mark Sanford’s Narrative

Mark Sanford's teenage son meets his father's mistress-turned-fiancée for the first time at this victory party following the primary.

Mark Sanford, upon winning a U.S. house seat from South Carolina less than two years after an extramarital affair and divorce with plans to marry his mistress, said:

“Some guy came up to me the other day and said you look a lot like Lazarus,” Sanford told the crowd Tuesday night, referring to the man who, according to the Bible, Christ raised from the dead. “I’ve talked a lot about grace during the course of this campaign,” he said. “Until you experience human grace as a reflection of God’s grace, I don’t think you really get it. And I didn’t get it before.”

“I want to acknowledge a God not just of second chances,” Sanford said in his victory speech in Charleston, referring to his first TV ad in which he asked voters to support him despite his past problems. “But a God of third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth chances because that is the reality of our shared humanity.”

Ross Douthat reacts:

Because of course when Jesus told his disciples to forgive sinners seven times seven times, what he really meant was that they should affirm people in whatever they’ve done and want to do and then return them to high office as swiftly as possible. And when he raised Lazarus from the dead, it was likewise a sign that no political ambition need ever be set aside or abandoned, no matter how the politician in question has failed the public trust. For that matter, who can forget the famous gospel passage where John the Baptist officiated at King Herod’s second marriage, and then encouraged the Roman government to give Herod a few new titles and honors? I’m surprised Sanford didn’t reference that one!

If you think, as I obviously do, that we have more than enough Sanford-style religion in America, then the way he used the megaphone afforded by victory to do a little creative scriptural interpretation illustrates the problem with just bracketing a politician’s private life and saying “vote the party, not the man.” When that private life is already woven into the public narrative, a vote for the man is often a vote to ratify that narrative, and to lend one’s support not only to particular policies, but to a larger view of human behavior and affairs — encompassing, in this case, a theologically bankrupt and socially destructive understanding of what real redemption actually involves.

You can read the whole thing here.

Update: Rod Dreher has a good post contrasting Sanford’s actions with that of John Profumo, the disgraced British cabinet minister caught in a sex scandal who retired from public life.

We need to be careful here not to buy into a works-righteousness mentality that pays back infidelity and shame with a meritorious stream of good works that will balance things out. At the same time, is it really too much to ask (to use Jonah Goldberg’s wording) that “maybe the interval between scandal and rehabilitation could last a little longer than the maturation time of a fruit fly”?

Charles Templeton: Missing Jesus

Chuck Templeton, Torrey Johnson and Billy Graham in a publicity photo for the European trip taken in the YFC offices in Chicago. Ca. March 1946. (Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College)

Charles Templeton (1915-2001) first professed faith in 1936 and became an evangelist that same year. In 1945 he met Billy Graham and the two became friends, rooming and ministering together during a 1946 YFC evangelistic tour in Europe.

But by 1948 Templeton’s life and worldview were beginning to go in a different direction than Graham’s. Doubts about the Christian faith were solidifying as he planned to enter Princeton Theological Seminary. Less than a decade later (1957), he would publicly declare that he had become an agnostic.

In his 1996 memoir, Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith, Templeton recounted a conversation with Graham in Montreat prior to entering seminary:

All our differences came to a head in a discussion which, better than anything I know, “explains” Billy Graham and his phenomenal success as an evangelist.

In the course of our conversation I said, “But, Billy, it’s simply not possible any longer to believe, for instance, the biblical account of creation. The world was not created over a period of days a few thousand years ago; it has evolved over millions of years. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s a demonstrable fact.”

“I don’t accept that,” Billy said. “And there are reputable scholars who don’t.”

“Who are these scholars?’ I said. “Men in conservative Christian colleges?”

“Most of them, yes,” he said. “But that is not the point. I believe the Genesis account of creation because it’s in the Bible. I’ve discovered something in my ministry: When I take the Bible literally, when I proclaim it as the word of God, my preaching has power. When I stand on the platform and say, ‘God says,’ or ‘The Bible says,’ the Holy Spirit uses me. There are results. Wiser men than you or I have been arguing questions like this for centuries. I don’t have the time or the intellect to examine all sides of the theological dispute, so I’ve decided once for all to stop questioning and accept the Bible as God’s word.”

“But Billy,” I protested, “You cannot do that. You don’t dare stop thinking about the most important question in life. Do it and you begin to die. It’s intellectual suicide.”

“I don’t know about anybody else,” he said, “but I’ve decided that that’s the path for me.”

Their trajectories had been chosen.

An image from Brad Templeton's Photo Site.

Fifty years later, Lee Strobel had an opportunity to interview Templeton, who had just a couple of more years to live. He was in his 80s and suffering from Alzheimer’s, but still a clear conversation parter. In A Case for Faith, Strobel recounts the ending of their wide-ranging conversation.

“And how do you assess this Jesus?” It seemed like the next logical question—but I wasn’t ready for the response it would evoke.

Templeton’s body language softened. It was as if he suddenly felt relaxed and comfortable in talking about an old and dear friend. His voice, which at times had displayed such a sharp and insistent edge, now took on a melancholy and reflective tone. His guard seemingly down, he spoke in an unhurried pace, almost nostalgically, carefully choosing his words as he talked about Jesus.

“He was,” Templeton began, “the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique. He was the intrinsically wisest person that I’ve ever encountered in my life or in my readings. His commitment was total and led to his own death, much to the detriment of the world. What could one say about him except that this was a form of greatness?”

I was taken aback. “You sound like you really care about him,” I said.

“Well, yes, he is the most important thing in my life,” came his reply. “I . . . I . . . I . . . ,” he stuttered, searching for the right word, ‘I know it may sound strange, but I have to say . . . I adore him!” . . .

” . . . Everything good I know, everything decent I know, everything pure I know, I learned from Jesus. Yes . . . yes. And tough! Just look at Jesus. He castigated people. He was angry. People don’t think of him that way, but they don’t read the Bible. He had a righteous anger. He cared for the oppressed and exploited. There’s no question that he had the highest moral standard, the least duplicity, the greatest compassion, of any human being in history. There have been many other wonderful people, but Jesus is Jesus….’

“Uh . . . but . . . no,’ he said slowly, ‘he’s the most . . .” He stopped, then started again. “In my view,” he declared, “he is the most important human being who has ever existed.”

That’s when Templeton uttered the words I never expected to hear from him. “And if I may put it this way,” he said as his voice began to crack, ‘I . . . miss . . . him!”

With that tears flooded his eyes. He turned his head and looked downward, raising his left hand to shield his face from me. His shoulders bobbed as he wept. . . .

Templeton fought to compose himself. I could tell it wasn’t like him to lose control in front of a stranger. He sighed deeply and wiped away a tear. After a few more awkward moments, he waved his hand dismissively. Finally, quietly but adamantly, he insisted: “Enough of that.”

A Note from Crossway’s President

Dear Friends of Crossway,

As you may have heard, a flood recently swept through Crossway’s headquarters. About two feet of water poured into our 32 first-floor offices due to unrelenting rains. The damage was extensive and repairs and rebuilding will take five or six months. You can see the damage here in this video.

More important, however, is the impact this could have on major ministry projects that we have planned.

As a not-for-profit ministry, Crossway is not only committed to publishing the ESV Bible and gospel-centered content, but also to providing God’s Word to hundreds of thousands of people overseas, either free or at a substantially reduced cost. Because of the recent flood, however, some of these international ministry efforts are now at risk.

Your willingness to stand with us today will help Crossway recover and carry forward our not-for-profit ministry and our strategic efforts to reach the world with the gospel and the truth of God’s Word.

That’s why I’m sending this e-mail — first, to ask for your prayers at this critical moment; and, second, to ask (if the Lord should lead you) for a gift of support. Your gift will help us cover three things: (1) the portion of the damage not covered by insurance, and (2) the installation of new safeguards to flood-proof our building. But most importantly (3) your gift will help ensure that crucial Bible ministry projects can continue to advance.

I would be deeply grateful to you if you are able to help us at this critical time. Specifically, we need your help to raise $360,000 by the end of our fiscal year, May 31st. Your support will make it possible especially for us to continue moving forward with the following priority projects:

Translation costs for the ESV Chinese Study Bible, to be published in Mainland China
Printing costs for 60,000 copies of the Chinese-English ESV bi-lingual Bible, also for publication and distribution in Mainland China
Completion and global distribution of the ESV Gospel Transformation Bible this fall
Development of the Knowing the Bible studies, to be offered free digitally worldwide

Though we don’t know exactly how the Lord will use these events for his kingdom and for his glory, we are confident in his grace and mercy and in his gracious provision for the work he has called us to do—trusting his words in Isaiah 43:2: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.”

With my great appreciation for your prayers and support,

Lane T. Dennis, PhD

President

Crossway.org/support

How Can You Say the Christ Is the Only Way to God?

R. C. Sproul powerfully sets the question within the context of the greatest and truest story ever told:

HT: Derek Thomas / Ref21